Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 気になってる人が男じゃなかった // Next 葬送のフリーレン, then ウスズミの果て

Ah, 8 weeks, not 8 chapters. I saw that, but misunderstood.

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What’s the threshold for a candidate to be kicked out of the proposals?

@NicoleIsEnough @Naphthalene @Ditto20 @davids68

Just for simplicity tagging you all :sweat_smile:

To clarify: yes, I am going by “seven weeks or less” = short. In the case of Haikyuu, for example, the first chapter will be split (because we usually like to ease people in and the first chapter is long), so it will take at least eight weeks and therefore doesn’t qualify as short. There has to be a cut-off somewhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the list of short manga in the voting post remains accurate, but if anyone else wants to double-check that’s the kind of criteria I’m using.

ALSO YAY SHROOMS! :mushroom: GO SHROOMS :tada:

this has been a manic day (well, week / year) so I’m feeling a bit hysterical

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Well, as I’ve been doing it… it’s complicated? I can give you the complete rationale for each removal I’ve been responsible for, but the relevant aspect for your question - I suspect - is that an option won’t be booted out on the basis of one bad performance.

I’ve been looking at the moving average over the four most recent polls, and as a very rough idea options which have an average below / up to ~15% have found themselves on the chopping block. To be honest, that’s basically the whole story, but I like to agonise over things so I have a whole OneNote page devoted to weighing this up :grin:

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Oh derp! You did all the science and I did not even notice :woman_facepalming: Apologies!

BUT :slight_smile:

I think Shimeji also belongs on that list, no? It is only 139 pages, and its index goes like this:


(the last page is 131)

So technically there are 10 chapters, but they are all ~12 pages only, and I think that would be a bit artificially stretched out if we only read 1 chapter per week…
(especially compared to FB which has ~30 text-heavy pages per week…)

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Hanako is suddenly in third

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Well, I did think about that quite a bit when I was putting the nomination together, and was very torn.

It’s relatively dense as a 4-koma (people did Not Have Fun with One-Week Friends) and it doesn’t have furigana, so there are aspects that make it harder. I kind of felt like… maybe we should appreciate the easier picks when they come along :joy: but I do agree that 10 pages a week (yeah, only 10) is pretty short compared to our usual pace.

I just remember when we read Non Non Biyori and it was quite a struggle to get through two chapters a week, and I felt like we’d just made it harder for ourselves unnecessarily - that one chapter/week was a good default. But yeah, 10 pages. That’s short.

I guess we could do chapters 1 and 2 separately and then combine subsequent pairs of chapters, for 6 weeks in total. When we read Non Non we started out with two chapters a week, which was probably the main difficulty. But then we are supposed to be a club for beginners :stuck_out_tongue:

We should have run a poll for this before we started, really - but what do people think?

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Oh, I see, I was not aware of all the implications. Well, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter that much whether we read it a bit slower or faster, if there are good reasons either way. I was just surprised because of the low page numbers. And I extrapolated a bit from Girls’ Last Tour :slight_smile:
I think it definitely makes sense to start slowly, with the option of speeding up. We could even run a poll after the first two chapters to see what people think. No need to plan everything in detail up-front if it feels like the decision contains too much uncertainty…

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Well, see above about how I like to agonise unnecessarily over everything :grin:

And it does matter, really, because we need a definitive answer as to whether we’ll read the 2nd-place pick if Shimeji wins, as it currently looks like it might :eyes: unfortunately the two sensible paces span the cut-off. I suppose we could just treat it like a short pick, and deal with the consequences if it turns out we do need to take longer.

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I think that might be the most sensible solution because if we’d treat it as a long pick and then find out that we want to speed up, then that would give us only a very short timeframe for the next poll and the next round of ordering and stuff… which might not be ideal given the current state of the world :cry:

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Alright, think I gotta call it…

Winner: Shimeji Simulation

Start date: 26th September

I will create the home thread and update the OP here as soon as I can, but in the meantime please see the nomination listing in the OP for purchase links if you’re a keen bean.

Runner-up: Haikyuu!!

As Shimeji is likely to be a short pick (less than eight weeks), we are also selecting the second-place option to follow on straight afterwards. The earliest this will start is 14th November, but there’s a chance it could get pushed back, up to 12th December, if we end up taking Shimeji Simulation a bit slower.

As above, see the nomination listing in the OP for purchase links for now.

I will organise assistance for this one over the next week or so, as I won’t be reading it. Thanks to those who’ve already mentioned they’d be willing to help.


It was great to have so many people participate in the vote! Look forward to seeing you in the upcoming book clubs :blush: and if your favourite didn’t win, remember there’s always next time :wink:

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Are you supposed to run Shimeji? As I said, always happy to help with home & weekly threads (just shout) :slight_smile:

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Thank you! I’m excited to read this one though (and I did nominate it), so happy to run it :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’m glad to see two very different books coming up! Sadly, I’m going to be absent for most of the second book and won’t be able to participate in that one :sob:

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Oh that’s nice! Looking forward to reading it together with you, then :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Yay, excited for a ハイキュー book club (at some point)! The friends I’ve been reading Fruits Basket aloud with said they’d read it with me, and I can’t wait to hear us stumbling over the way they talk. :grin:

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!!! thanks, I’ll keep that book club on my bookmarks and read it once we’re done with Shimeji and Haikyuu :purple_heart:

Also: yay, I’m really looking forward to reading both with everyone!!

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So i just bought the two voted picks and i have to say i would have preferred hanako-kun to win instead of Haikyuu. Wait… hold on… don’t panic. I know i’m contradicting myself but i can explain.
I really like haikyuu :heart:. Some may call it an infatuation. As i was ordering the 1st volume i had this urge to buy all available volumes (44 in all). It was a mixture of it ending recently and it being voted as the second read that almost made me do it. But, i really don’t want to see the covers. Scared of the spoilers on them (anime only). And if i have them available i might be tempted to read through them, but then i’ll be heartbroken because it ended and frankly i enjoy the anime more. So yeah ended up only buying the first volume. Crisis averted (for now)

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Quite. I absolutely love reading 4-koma manga in English, but for some reason, doing it in Japanese is a heavy slog.

Though come to think of it, it usually takes me a fair bit longer to read 4-koma than regular manga in English, too.

And of course Kinokuniya is also out of Shimeji. Suddenly the WaniKani Book Club Effect is clearing the shelves even before we’ve picked the book.

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Shouldn’t Japanese publishers be monitoring these threads, and printing extra copies of all nominations, just in case?

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